Background: Cancer treatment misinformation, or false claims about alternative cures, often spreads faster and farther than true information on social media. Cancer treatment misinformation can harm the psychosocial and physical health of individuals with cancer and their cancer care networks by causing distress and encouraging people to abandon support, potentially leading to deviations from evidence-based care. There is a pressing need to understand how cancer treatment misinformation is shared and uncover ways to reduce misinformation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArtificial intelligence (AI) is already widely used in daily communication, but despite concerns about AI's negative effects on society the social consequences of using it to communicate remain largely unexplored. We investigate the social consequences of one of the most pervasive AI applications, algorithmic response suggestions ("smart replies"), which are used to send billions of messages each day. Two randomized experiments provide evidence that these types of algorithmic recommender systems change how people interact with and perceive one another in both pro-social and anti-social ways.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSocial norms are powerful determinants of human behaviors in offline and online social worlds. While previous research established a correlational link between norm perceptions and self-reported disclosure on social network sites (SNS), questions remain about downstream effects of prevalent behaviors on perceived norms and actual disclosure on SNS. We conducted two preregistered studies using a realistic social media simulation.
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